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Al Franken, sex pest and hypocrite, is one of many: Mallick

Here are one feminist’s random thoughts on U.S. Sen. Al Franken pestering, mocking and pushing his tongue into the mouth of an unwilling woman and then groping her breasts as she lay asleep on a plane. In front of a photographer. While she was wearing body armour. While they were returning from Afghanistan where they “entertained” American troops. In 2006. Not that long ago.

Franken is a sex pest, a jerk and a hypocrite.

U.S. Sen. Al Franken apologized to Leeann Tweeden this week after the Los Angeles radio show anchor said he forcibly kissed her and later groped her on a 2006 USO tour. (TWITTER)

Franken is one of the best men in the U.S. Senate.

Franken is not a pedophile, unlike the monstrous Alabama Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore, and Moore’s cackling at the photo of Franken’s “guilt” is just another manifestation of Southern-branded evil.

In the apology Franken offered to broadcaster Leeann Tweeden, Franken is right to say that it doesn’t matter what he was thinking during the photo. What matters is what Tweeden thought when she saw the evidence. Inscriptions in high school yearbooks are being called fake and photos disparaged. Will they demand fingerprints on breasts next? Oh look, they’re all smudged.

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It’s worse to force your tongue down a woman’s throat, as President Trump did to Canadian journalist Natasha Stoynoff in 2005 than to have yourself photographed fondling her, as George H.W. Bush has repeatedly done. No, it’s worse to expose yourself to her as President Bill Clinton did to Paula Jones, or to rape an intern, as JFK did with Mimi Alford. Every victim comes to know what memories she can endure, or not endure. I find the physical pain of a breast grope hard to handle, also hard to conceal at the time. One tries not to scream.

Franken did this to Tweeden three years after he published his 2003 book, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, in which he describes another USO tour, this one just after 9/11. He says he persuaded three “very game” New England Patriots cheerleaders to do a stripper routine, “their raunchiest NFL bump and grind,” while wearing burkas.

The Army said no, as it would degrade Muslims. “But it’s funny!” Franken wrote. “As a comedian, that’s always my immediate reaction. Somehow, though, I can’t say, ‘But it’s funny!’ to the commander of the 86th Airlift Wing.”

So Franken didn’t have the nerve to insist to a male Air Force officer that degrading women would be funny. But he knew readers like me would laugh, right?

The photo was “clearly” intended as humour, Franken said initially. But why “clearly”? When I saw it, I wondered if she was drugged like Bill Cosby’s victims or anesthetized, like jailed sex offender Dr. George Doodnaught’s patients at North York General Hospital. She is inert. Franken is posing with her like Eric Trump with the trophy corpse of a leopard he slaughtered for amusement. He, and Franken, mug for the camera.

We tell women to develop a thicker skin. Franken groped a woman who was wearing actual body armour. While wearing a flak jacket and helmet like hers, Franken had been shot at over Kosovo on a USO tour in 2001. He knows what fear is. It did not make him kinder to his co-performer.

Sexual harassment is not an issue of left and right, of white skin or otherwise. Men on both sides do it — men on the left are just more morally slithery about it — and some women abet it. It is a dirty trick by the powerful on the powerless, an easy humiliation. When it has been done to me, the men in my life — co-workers, friends, family — have been my greatest support.

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Gloria Steinem was wrong to defend Bill Clinton in 1998 for his history of assaulting and exposing himself to women. As U.S. journalist Caitlin Flanagan wrote harshly and fairly this week, Steinem believed the women but nevertheless “slut-shamed, victim-blamed and age-shamed” them.

Even my hero Steinem can founder, for it was so much worse in her era. Or perhaps the coming backlash will make it worse than ever.

No one wants to hear reports of sexual harassment, especially when they’re work-related. They will make this clear to you. The stories are being forced into the open at this moment, thanks to great journalism, but the moment will vanish.

I have always said that women should never underestimate how much they are hated. It’s built into human history and will not end soon. Only good men and women can fight this together. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s feminism — making sure that women get an equal shot at power and encouraging girls to prepare for it — is the only heartening example of equality that I can point to.

When women gain equal power, they won’t be treated quite as badly. My hopes for this are thin.

In the photo, Franken is leering. I am studying another photo, this one of United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees Special Envoy Angelina Jolie on her way to a big group portrait of UN foreign dignitaries and military officials in Vancouver this week. She was giving a speech at the 2017 United Nations Peacekeeping Defence Ministerial conference.

UNHCR Special Envoy Angelina Jolie walks past delegates to join them for a group photo at the UN Peacekeeping Defence Ministerial conference in Vancouver Wednesday. Almost no one looks at her face, Heather Mallick writes, but if her body were to be marked by the male gaze, it would be scored and bleeding. (DARRYL DYCK/The Canadian Press)

Vancouver photojournalist Darryl Dyck captured a hideous moment. Jolie is passing a wall of men — there are about seven women among 80 men — at a meeting of nations.

As Jolie passes, some men are openly staring at her rear and smirking. Two men, inches away from her, are looking directly at her breasts, one peering into the bodice of her loose dress. In the back row, a male delegate’s tongue is all but hanging out. He is convulsed. Almost no one looks at her face but if her body were to be marked by the male gaze, it would be scored and bleeding.

In her speech, Jolie advocated for the right of women and girls to live a life free of sexual violence.

Many good men have this goal as well. Please be our allies. Young women entering the workforce are about to be shocked by the reality of what all women face.

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